an
oozing, quaking morass. It no longer represented merely a positive not
too alluring problem in engineering--that strip of swamp and open
water. It had taken on a newer, strategic importance. And the change
in Steve's plans, so far as the work at Thirty-Mile was concerned, was
as much due to the news which Fat Joe brought home with him, one night
toward the end of the next week, as it was the result of the interview
which he had held with Hardwick Elliott himself.

Joe had been a whole day absent on the north end of the line. Alone he
had been over every foot of that all but completed stretch which ended
at the border of swampland, there at headquarters, troubling himself
not at all over the unevenness of the roadbed, satisfied entirely with
the surety he gained with every inspected mile, that a train-load of
logs or a dozen train-loads, would stay on the rails when the rails
were laid, and the day came to set wheels rolling. But the further
report he brought back with him was far less reassuring.

"I wonder," Joe mused aloud that night, "I wonder, now, why any man who
knows anything about handling timber should go to work bothering
himself with skidways leadin' down to the river, when he knows, as well
as Harrigan should know, that it ain't comin' out that way? It don't
seem good sense nor logic to me, unless----"

He stopped there and left his own opinion unfinished. Since the
evening Harrigan had stepped out of the main bunkhouse and disappeared,
black rage in his face and a promise to return upon his lips, that
lumberman's red head had been conspicuous only because it was absent
from the landscape. So far Harrigan had failed to reappear and Fat
Joe's method of apprising his chief of his return to the Reserve
Company's pay-roll was distinctly characteristic. But Steve's
reception of the news was little more than listless. He seemed to
change the subject entirely.

"I don't see why it wouldn't be just as easy, or easier," he replied,
"to cross here on pilings, practically the whole distance, as it would
be to fill and bridge, too. And if we were to look at it in that
light, then why wouldn't it be still easier to drive those piles, say
next February or March, while the swamp is still crusted over and hard.
It would afford us some sort of a footing to work on then, other than
black ooze and lilypads. Wouldn't it seem so to you?"

Garry Devereau's agreement was quick with enthusiasm, but Fat Joe who